HAS Lectures Series

The pilot project "Safeguarding for Posterity Two Private Collections of Palm-Leaf Manuscripts from the Tamil Country (EAP1294)" has been awarded a grant under the British Library's Endangered Archives Program, supported by the Arcadia Fund!

Suganya Anandakichenin (PI), Giovanni Ciotti (University of Hamburg) and S. A. S. Sarma (EFEO, Pondicherry) lead this ten-month project (August 2021-May 2022) aims to clean, digitize, and catalogue a portion of about 180 manuscripts belonging to two collections (called "Kalliṭaikuṟicci" and Villiampākkam).

These manuscripts, many of which date from the mid-19th century, contain texts of various genres, in Tamil, Sanskrit and Manipravalam, written in Tamil and Grantha. Previously neglected, these relics of the past will give us a clear idea of the reading and study choices of a Tamil and Vishnu Brahmin scholarly family from the 19th century onwards. Work on the project is currently underway at the EFEO Center in Pondicherry.

The integration of the André Leroi-Gourhan collection into the EFEO library is now achieved!After the inventory and reporting of the archives, and the cataloguing of all the monographs (Sudoc), all the periodicals in this collection have been inventoried and catalogued.

The collection of periodicals in the Leroi-Gourhan collection includes 30 titles, the most complete of which are 民俗藝術 Minzoku geijutsu  and  工藝 Kōgei, a publication co-edited by Yanagi Muneyoshi, the specialist in folk arts and "mingei studies". This monthly journal, with a print run of only 1000 copies, devoted to craftsmanship, materials and tools used in the making of objects, is rare and precious.

The Jacques Bacot collection is now online. Discover pictures taken between 1903 and 1914 by one of the pioneers of Tibetan studies in France during his travels in India, Myanmar, Tibet or China.